Here, this will put you to sleep:
"To speak of Gnosticism as a movement is misleading, for the term suggests a concrete organization or a church. There were, as we have seen, plenty of Gnostic teachers, each with his coterie of adherents, but there was no single Gnostic Church. On the other hand, it is clear that behind all the variegated Gnostic sects there lay a common stock of ideas which could fasten upon, adapt themselves to and eventually transform any religious movement concerned to find an answer to the problems of existence, evil and salvation. These ideas may now be briefly summarized. First, most of the Gnostic schools were thoroughly dualistic, setting an infinite chasm between the spiritual world and the world of matter, which they regarded as intrinsically evil. Secondly, when they tried to explain how the material order came into existence, they agreed in refusing to attribute its origin to the ultimate God, the God of light and goodness. It must be the result of some primeval disorder, some conflict or fall, in the higher realm, and its fabricator must have been some inferior deity or Demiurge. Where the Old Testament was accepted as authoritative, it was easy and natural to identify him with the Creator-God of the Jews. Thirdly, the Gnostics all believed that there is a spiritual element in man, or at any rate in the elite of mankind, which is a stranger in this world and which yearns to be freed from matter and to ascend to its true home. Fourthly, they pictured a mediator or mediators descending down the successive aeons or heavens to help it achieve this. These ideas were expounded in a setting of elaborate pseudo-cosmological speculation, and extensive use was made of pagan myths, the Old Testament and concepts borrowed from Far Eastern religions.
In this way, then, the Gnostics sought to explain the riddle of man's plight in a universe he feels to be alien to himself. But what of the redemption they offered? Here we come to the distinctive feature which gives Gnosticism its name. In all the Gnostic systems redemption is brought about by knowledge, and it is the function of the divine mediators to open the eyes of the 'pneumatic' men to the truth. 'The spiritual man', the disciples of the Valentinian Marcus declared, 'is redeemed by knowledge'; while according to Basilides, 'the Gospel is knowledge of supramundane things'. In other words, when a man has really grasped the Gnostic myths in all their inwardness, and thus realizes who he is, how he has come to his present condition, and what is that 'indescribable Greatness' which is the Supreme God, the spiritual element in him begins to free itself from the entanglements of matter. In the vivid imagery of Valentinus's Gospel of Truth, before he acquires that knowledge, he plunges about like a drunken man in a dazed state, but having acquired it he awakens, as it were, from his intoxicated slumbers. Iraneus has a colorful passage describing how the possession of this esoteric knowledge - of the abysmal Fall, of Achamoth, of the Demiurge and so forth - was supposed to enable the Gnostic to overcome the powers confronting him after death, and so to traverse the successive stages of his upward journey.
It is easy to understand the fascination which the Gnostic complex of ideas exercised on many Christians. The Church, too, professed to offer men saving knowledge, and set Christ before them as the revelation of the Father. There was a powerful strain in early Christianity which was in sympathy with Gnostic tendencies. We can see it at work in the Fourth Gospel, with its axiom that eternal life consists in knowledge of God and of Christ, and even more clearly in such second-century works as 2 Clement and Theophilus' Ad Autolycum. As we noticed above, Clement of Alexandria freely applied the title 'gnostics' to Christians who seemed to have a philosophic grasp of their faith. It is the existence of a genuinely Christian, orthodox 'gnosis' side by side with half-Christian, heretical or even non-Christian versions which in part accounts for the difficulty in defining Gnosticism precisely. As has been shown, many of the Gnostic teachers mentioned above sincerely regarded themselves as Christians, and there is an element of truth in the thesis that their systems were attempts to restate the simple Gospel in terms which contemporaries would find philosophically, even scientifically, more satisfying. The root incompatibility between Christianity and Gnosticism really lay, as second-century Fathers like Iraneus quickly perceived, in their different attitudes to the material order and the historical process. Because in general they disparaged matter and were disinterested in history, the Gnostics (in the narrower, more convenient sense of the term) were prevented from giving full value to the
Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the Word."
JND Kelly, pgs 26-28 |
